There is at least one Apple engineer here who visits this site regularly and can say for sure if the stuff isn't supposed to be talked about, and the word is mum so far, which suggests to me that... until I can see something that suggests otherwise, I say...

let's party!

I should point out that my reasoning is that I've signed (read:clicked on) lots of agreements with Apple to download their stuff over the years (in good faith, because of the impracticality of dissecting the legalese every time), and the standard spiel is that it's always "hush-hush" even though it's not, in all publicly released situations that I've witnessed -- which appears to be a pre-emptive attempt to keep the ball in their legal court at all times -- which is understandable, considering how big a target they are for legal action. The only delineation point that seems to ever come up in fighting words in their agreements is whether or not it's "beta" or "pre-release". IANAL, but I don't think the "spirit" of the agreement is to suppress non-beta or non-pre-release information. As I comprehend it, the caveat would be that if you sign an agreement for information regarding a service you are *paying for*, such as the iPhone developer program, then you need to not talk about specific fight club docs you get access to, otherwise........ game on!

Unless someone from Apple can drop in and say this is dead wrong, I just don't see the difference between iPhone coming out of beta and OS X coming out of beta. Should be clear for all practical intents and purposes as much as I can tell.

I assumed that with the release of 2.0, the iphone sdk image dmg file saying "iphone_sdk_final" that it was out of beta. I thought Apple was just behind with the whole email notifications because they've been a bit lazy with this, because I never got an email for beta 8 and there are no knew release notes/bug fixes/api changes for beta 8 and up.

and why do I keep seeing answers to questions that say, "I would tell you but the NDA doesn't let me?"

I read the NDA and there is nothing in there that prohibits anyone from helping someone else use the iPhone SDK. There is nothing in there that prevents anyone with sharing their own original code with other people.

If there is some text in there that says otherwise, please point it out.

It seems to me that a bunch of non-lawyers seem to all of a sudden know all about NDA's and contracts. Having been to law school and having taken contracts, I guarantee you that you don't understand contracts if you think the NDA is SO restrictive.

Let's look at the terms for a sec. And no the terms are NOT confidential!

First, it says the the SDK and any other non-public information will be deemed confidential. Fine.

But, then later it says that any information that is available to the public not through no fault or breach of the recipient will not be deemed confidential. The SDK is available to the public, therefore, this statement conflicts with the first statement. It is common law, that any conflict within the terms of a contract shall disfavor the party who wrote the contract.

There are more holes to this, but that's the biggest. I especially love the part where it says you cannot make public statements about the agreement. This completely ignores the fact that the agreement is a public document, freely downloadable, and you don't have to agree to it, to download it!

Trade secret law is very clear on this. If a company wants to hold on to a trade secret, it has to take good measure to do so. A click-through agreement on software that anyone can download is not much control. Heck, Apple even advertises how many people downloaded the SDK. When 100,000 or 1/2 million or whatever the number is of people have your secret, it's not much of a secret anymore! How many people do you think know the Coca-Cola recipe?

There is at least one Apple engineer here who visits this site regularly and can say for sure if the stuff isn't supposed to be talked about, and the word is mum so far, which suggests to me that... until I can see something that suggests otherwise, I say...

I'm sorry, but what would an Apple engineer know about legal issues such as this?